QuickAdvice: Beautifully Manage Your Finances With Squirrel 2
Squirrel 2 ($2.99) by Axel Péju is another beautiful app that lets you manage your finances right on your iPhone.
When you first open Squirrel 2, you'll be at the accounts screen. Simply start adding your accounts by hitting the Edit button, and that welcoming little green + button appears.
You get to choose from five different accounts to add and track - Checking, Savings, Cash, Credit Card, Friend (haha, nice one). Each one has a beautiful icon to go with it to let you know immediately on the main screen what kind of account it is.
Once you get your accounts set up, you can now begin to track your account activity. Unfortunately, it all must be manually entered, so it's time to visit your online accounts and track down your latest transactions!
You add a new transaction with the + button in the bottom corner. Then you enter the amount in the keypad, which represents a mini calculator, allowing you to add up various amounts when needed. The down arrow will be for an expense, represented by a blue background and parentheses on the number. The up arrow is for any income, where the number will have a green background.
Finish that and go to the next step, which is a description of the transaction. Lastly, you'll be at the transaction details screen, which allows you to edit the previous two things, date, whether it's reconciled or not, categorize and tag it, and add any notes.
Hit done and you'll be back on the transaction screen for that particular account. Repeat that process for any necessary transactions. If you want to view transactions from a different month, you can access past months in the bottom right corner. This is the History section of an account, where you can only go to months where there has been at least one transaction.
I love how the transactions screen looks, with the little mini stacks of paper that represents each transaction. One thing that kind of annoyed me was that it lists and groups everything together a day earlier than it should be. For example, transactions I made on August 23 will be grouped under August 22. I think the developers should just let it be grouped the day of the transaction. I got confused at first as to why everything was grouped for a day before even though I double-checked the dates to make sure they were right.
Each account also allows you to 'transfer' money from another account in the app. This is useful when you pay credit cards or pull some money from your savings. Just make sure to do the official transaction to actually get your money.
Budgets can be set in the app as well, complete with your own categories, frequencies, and set allowances for each. Blue progress bars will show how much you've spent in that area, and if you've gone over your budget, you'll know with that full red bar. Earnings can be tracked with green. The app shows Overall Spendings and Overall Earnings so you can easily see all of that at a glance.
Squirrel 2 is also able to sync with the companion desktop app, but I do not have the desktop app so I wasn't able to test out the sync. I would prefer to just use this as an on-the-go finance app anyway. If you have the desktop app, sync options are found in the Settings. A passcode can also be set if you do not want others to get access to your finance information (though no account numbers are stored).
If you frequently use the same descriptions, categories and tags, then the Autocomplete option in the Settings is your best friend. It will remember what category and tag you set before for any descriptions that are the same. If you want to see who made the app and visit their website, there's options for those in the Settings as well.
Overall, this is a great finance app. The one thing I would like to see in a future update is the option to export data if you don't use the desktop app. Just a basic export into .csv would do fine, as long as it's something that can be taken out of the app anytime and viewed somewhere else. This should be in all finance apps, actually.
But I think I may start using this as my go-to app for my finances (yeah, yeah, I'm broke, I know) from now on. Or at least a companion alongside my actual online banking accounts, since there's no current way to pull data out unless you have the desktop app. It's beautiful to look at and very responsive, it's clear that the developers took their time with this app.
So if you're looking for a finance app, this is one to check out.
